Georgia Earth
by Jan Starkey
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
VIII. Pit
For Claire’s seventh birthday in the early fall, her mother planned to throw a big party, inviting all the children in Claire’s class. Cal styled Claire’s hair up in an I-Dream-of-Jeannie knot, and she wore a purple pantsuit with loud yellow daisies. The basement was decorated with lavender and blue streamers, draped from the exposed pipes in the ceiling and wrapped around the poles in spirals.
The theme was flowers. Even the cake was a flower, shiny tinfoil petals that flounced a little at the ends, the center, which was the cake itself, blue icing she watched her mother make with food coloring, stirring a sapphire liquid into swirls and pinwheels.
One boy, Nash, who liked Claire, she didn’t like, but all the other girls were in love with him and they screamed and gathered around him whenever he appeared. The girls chased him like the bees that shadowed Claire whenever she approached her mother’s roses, hovering near her in the swampy air. When Nash arrived to her house, the girls, all except Claire, rushed up and flocked about him, and when he ran away from them, they charged after him again, then fluttered and drew closer.
Nash had blonde curly hair and sky-blue eyes. He wasn’t Claire’s type. She liked Jimmy McClellan up until the end of the summer, when he put his penis through a hole in his bathing suit to scare the kids away in her parents’ carport. It worked, and the third time he did it, Claire went and told her mother, who got him to stop. The children scattered home for the rest of that day.
She still liked looking at him; he was tall and skinny, dark hair and red lips as if he’d always just drunk cherry juice. Jimmy McClellan taught her how to whirl around in the shallow end, spreading his arms out like wings, trying to fly, waving them one way and twisting his torso under the water.
When the children played “Dark Shadows” in the partially-built house at the construction pit, Jimmy McClellan — Barnabas — found Claire first; she was hiding in a closet on the third floor. She rushed to hold up her index fingers to make a cross, but he was fast upon her — leaning in to bite her neck, almost like a kiss.
Now, Claire was a vampire, too. They were the undead, and they would sleep in coffins that creaked open in their tombs at night. Her skin would turn pale and her lips bright red, like Jimmy McClellan’s, with a flash of two symmetrical sharp teeth.
IX. Ground
Claire’s mother taught second grade at a school that was all-Black with the exception of herself. It was named for George Washington Carver, the man who discovered the peanut. Claire wondered how he discovered the peanut, but she didn’t question it. She just wanted to know how peanuts came from the ground.
Peas, peas, peas, peas, eating goober peas
Goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas
Her brother sang on a cafeteria stage with three other Boy Scouts in their blue uniforms next to a Confederate flag.
Her mother brought home a bag full of books: one, the same primer reader with Dick and Jane. Claire would read ahead and, one day, she surprised Mrs. Gladstone by guessing what would happen on the next page: Jane hid a ball behind her back and Dick figured it out, but how?
“She is standing in front of a mirror? “Claire proposed.
“How did you know that?” Mrs. Gladstone asked. “Did you turn the page?”
“No,” said Claire. “I just guessed it.” She wanted Mrs. Gladstone to think that she was clever. The others who sat next to Claire knew she hadn’t turned the page. Why didn’t the teacher? Aware that she had lied to Mrs. Gladstone because she’d already read the story, she felt flush.
For Show-and-Tell, Claire sang a song she had practiced:
Hush little baby don’t say a word,
Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird,
and if that mockingbird won’t sing,
Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring...
Claire thought the words and the melody were beautiful, though she didn’t know why you would replace a bird with a diamond, a diamond with a looking glass, a looking glass with a Billy goat, in a series of continual trade-offs until you ended up with a pony.
She would rather start with the pony and end up with the bird. Then she would let the bird fly away and disappear into the fairyland above the clouds, in the World of Make-Believe; there you could also find the Giant’s castle where the goose was kept who laid the golden eggs or Brigadoon or heaven.
X. Hardpan
At recess, when Nash turned his attention to Claire, she dashed off to the crowd of girls-at-play. Even when girls chased the boys under the picnic tables, she didn’t chase Nash. But, when the situation changed, and boys chased the girls, he chased her, and she was thankful she could easily outrun him.
On Fridays, Cal brought his friend, Will, to meet with her at the interface of two playgrounds where sixth-graders crossed through. It was the only chance she got to see her brother at elementary school, because their grades were far apart; he was in sixth and she in first. He was at the end and she, the beginning.
“Meet my favorite sister!” Cal said when he first introduced Will to Claire; his words seemed to enter another realm, just over the gateway. She was his only sister, she thought. Cal made her laugh.
“Va Va Va Voom!” said Will and he turned his head in a blush. She guessed that his expression meant that she was pretty, but she didn’t know if she liked the sound of the words.
Her birthday was at the cut-off point for entering first grade; instead of pushing for Claire to start school sooner, her mother let her start later, because her mother had started school too soon, at age five; too young, she thought, and her mother always felt behind the others.
Claire would turn seven at the end of October. Her birthstone, an opal, had the wavy colors of the moon; her Star sign, Scorpio, was a creature like a lobster; her magic number, eight, was the number on the eight-ball.
Claire’s playground was a vast expanse of bald hardpan with a few tufts of dying grasses at the periphery. Beyond the surrounding fences, up and over the hill away from the school, through a patch of bushes, stood a Methodist church. “It used to be Calvinist,” her brother told her, punning on his name.
Cal said that Calvinism had something to do with “predestination,” and she didn’t know what that meant, but her father told her Calvinists believed God had chosen them from before they were born, to end up with God in Heaven.
Claire attended a Sunday school session at the church with Donna Langley, who was a year ahead of her, and the teacher told Claire, “Jesus loves you.” Although the words felt pleasing, Claire couldn’t imagine Jesus, and since she couldn’t, she speculated, how, if she didn’t know him, could he love her?
Then she wondered why she couldn’t think of who Jesus was but she could picture God and the Devil. God looked like the man on the Quaker Oats box with his stern, ruddy face and blue hat, and the Devil, the figure in the painting that hung in her family’s den.
Claire liked the swings best, but she wished she didn’t have to wait in line for them. At her turn, she secured herself in the black rubber beltseat and took off flying, looking up at the cross on the steeple of the church.
If time permitted, she tried the slides or seesaws. She put off playing on the contraption the children called The Lookout. It stood in the middle of the playground: a large, tall, red tower. You climbed up ladders, four on the outsides and one through a hole the middle. At the top, there was a platform like a treehouse but without a roof, corner to corner, surrounded by a chain link fence, loose like the ones at the movie theatres that the ushers opened up to let the lines go inside.
The Lookout loomed taller than her father, over six feet off the ground. There always seemed to be a herd of children crowded on the platform and another at the base, anxious for their chance.
XI. Garden
She was alone; no one was looking. She followed rows of trees along her road, mesmerized by the strange beauty of the flowers: they sprouted in clusters, yellow petals like pom-pom whispers, little arms flailing and stretching to the sun; the centers like black eyeballs, bulbous and dull. White flowy flowers cocked their heads lazily on their stalks like sleepy puppets. Stars of pale lemon dappled the lush lime green grasses. Orange-peach puffs peeped out of the soil, little bouquets for an elf’s wedding.
Claire twirled like a ballerina and began to sing. She invented the words and a tune as she went along, speaking directly to the foliage, “Hello to you the forest fair, what have you here for me, your Claire?”
In the trailing note, she felt a presence — she glanced up. Nothing. It must be God, she thought.
She continued to walk the length of the street, along the side where there were no houses yet, until it met gravel and dirt, and the dirt gave way to the clay-like marshes. The weeds smashed up against each other so that the flowers and brambles, dense with vines, formed a veil.
Claire peered through an opening to reveal an enclave in the weeping trees. She clambered through the hole at the border between them, the wispy tendrils of wild brushes catching in her hair. Here was a garden inside a garden.
A sticky weed bloomed under the canopy, all by itself, unfathomably beautiful. Was she the only one to see it? The morning dew still covered its stem and petals, the thistles were tiny stalks of dark-and-light purples. A spider’s web spun on the neck and pitched out towards the branches of a tree beside it, a silver thread almost invisible.
“Aurora,” Claire said to the flower, “I will come back for you.”
Farther in, she passed a proliferation of exotic flowers: white splashes in the center of their blood-red skirts, pink pinwheels paused in their spins. They grew from vines that held onto the ground like octopuses clutching the sea’s floor, their blooms puckered suction cups. Stems tall so that the flowers towered above the rest in a patch of thick grasses, their petals blending out from the center, red to orange to yellow, like tie-dyed T-shirts.
Violet-blue dots, minute and multiplied, resembling flicked paint across a brown canvas. Blossoms, their heads dense with pink flags, were cartoon wigs. And flowers in mixtures of white — open mouths, their throats filled with the markings of animal fur, their tongues sticking out at you — their leaves, claws with sharp nails.
XII. Peat
Claire’s parents, along with Cal, built a maze of boards stuck in the soft ground to hold the grass seeds in when it rained because the front yard slanted down toward the house.
Routinely, her brother and their parents — with the wheelbarrow, stacks of wood for partitions, grass seeds, bags of fertilizer, peat moss, and manure — started working on weekends, apportioning the front as what would someday be the lawn of the house.
She watched her brother gather the dark brown substances, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, and follow the directions of her father. Claire was thankful she didn’t have to help; her father said because she was younger and a girl.
Cal hated the work, he told her in private. It got to him so much, he wanted to refuse it, but he didn’t.
Alex Van Devere periodically came out to watch and lend a hand, but Cal hated Alex, too, ever since the day when Claire and Alex’s sisters, Sonja and Nina, tried to peer beneath the door of his room when Alex and Cal didn’t answer for hours.
While Alex and Cal spread down the dirt, Claire spotted clusters of roly-polys emerging near the roots of the front yard bushes. She traipsed over and scooped up a handful as if they were pets — the crustaceans immediately changed into tiny balls.
They were scared, she surmised, and suddenly she was repulsed, too, and she released them back into their moist, hidden habitat.
XIII. Crystal
A picture of a green-faced devil hung in the den. Claire looked at it a lot, getting up close, and staring for minutes on end. It scared her so that after a while, she would look away. She made a game of not looking at it as she walked into the room.
In the upper right corner, the devil held a pipe as he blew huge bubbles, each containing diminished scenes. He stood behind, watching over a young woman, his cue-ball head emerging from a vast collar of flames.
Claire’s eyes traced his outlines, his unnaturally large and pointy ears, his upturned, dramatic eyebrows and goatee, his black, pencil-moustache shooting straight up, his crystal-blue eyes, half-open, appearing caught in the ecstasy of seduction, while he directed his gaze simultaneously towards the woman and the bubble he was blowing.
In the center bubble, a man who wore a black tuxedo was pouring champagne into a glass on a white tablecloth, serving two women. One woman was enrapt with him; she leaned forward as she rested on her elbows; the other was engaged in conversation, her hand outstretched, ready to receive the glass.
Overlapping the center bubble, a woman in a white ballet dress danced on a stage above a crowd of men. They extended their arms to her, as if to play a part in the chorus of her show. Inside the bubble, just below the young woman’s face — where she touched her cheek in the place a tear might fall — a minister held a holy book before a kneeling couple, their backs to the viewer. She was wearing a wedding dress, the train flowing like a splashing wave — his head bowed. And held within the bubble that had emerged from the Devil’s downturned pipe: white bags marked by money signs among piles of gold coins.
“I hate the Devil, I love God,” she chanted in those moments when fear struck her in the space of ten minutes before she fell off to sleep.
When she couldn’t sleep, and Claire feared the Devil would enter her bedroom, she chanted, “I hate the Devil. I love God. I hate the Devil. I love God. I hate the Devil. I love God...” Then, she started to question if perhaps the Devil would want her to hate him, so maybe she was saying what he wanted. Every once in a while, she would turn the sentences around: “I love the Devil. I hate God.” But that didn’t feel right, so she started the old chant again to cleanse herself of the mistake.
Copyright © 2026 by Jan Starkey
